Catoblepas
196If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
i lived in california from ages 4-8 and we did phonics basically every grade level.
i moved to florida about 3/4 through 3rd grade and that was when i learned about educational standards at the ripe old age of 8 when everyone in my new third grade class read at a first grade level and even my teacher didn't seem to know what she was doing.
i have a formative memory from my first day. i asked the kid next to me when recess is, and his response was, "what's recess?"
I think you're overstating the effect of this method of instruction, which mostly affected much older people.
It was popular between 1960 and 1980, and waned after that. Whole word and three cueing was never as popular as phonics, and even when used, was mostly used in conjunction with phonics.
This Wikipedia article collects quite a bit of history across multiple countries.
By the 1990's, pretty much every American school system was back to phonics as a foundation. And by 2020, there were pretty much no American schools discouraging phonics instruction and the foundation for teaching reading.
That is...concerning.
I kinda like to play with writing systems, like Avatarian (Script made for Avatar Legend of Aang and Seven Havens), where each glyph is mapped onto a sound in US English IPA rather than just redesigning glyphs in the Latin Alphabet and I sometimes wonder if it would've been better if we had this system (with glyphs for "ch" and "Ll" of course).
Now reading that I think it might be a better system.
(with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course)
INB4 that user who insists on using thorn characters shows up to fight the good fight.
moth has younglings, and they definitely were taught to sound out words that can be. some words cannot be sounded out, those are called sight words. moth supposes that this isn't something that's nationwide.
(I did make another comment but I was being a little silly)
It's pretty insane to me that they don't teach phonics, since that's very important to actually reading a word, especially aloud. In my original comment I was ignoring that reading included determining the meaning of a word, but I was conflating reading with only reading aloud or simply identifying a word.
Three cueing can be important to reading and would probably help out on the spot, but is something I (and I assume many others) picked up naturally anyway from just reading a lot. I don't expect it to be taught in school instead of phonics, and it should not replace just looking up a word in the dictionary. This just seems absolutely absurd to me.
I’m thankful every day for my kid’s Montessori school. 5 years old and I’m already to the point where we read together every night for fun, but I’m not really needed. Sometimes I see the reading light on after bedtime, but I let it slip. 🥹
good parent ☺️
montessori is crazy, we’ve been doing lovery and their toys are so well designed
If you are interested APM did a whole podcast about this. I haven't listened but I hear it's great.
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
I knew the kids couldn’t read because I have multiple English teachers in my family, but until I listened to season 1 of that podcast (working through season 2 now) I had no idea it was from them not even being taught the basics of how to read! One guy they interviewed who learned to read fluently as an adult was basically like ‘when I learned I was like, that’s all you do? Why the fuck didn’t anyone teach me this?’
I mostly read in chunks of words, which I think I learned in school. This also means I can barely spell anything.
Parents are both overworked and lazy here in the States, are you surprised our education is faltering? This is by conservative design, the schools are defunded, teachers underpaid, schools are understaffed, under supplied and corrupt. The conservatives want the poor to be their new slaves, and the conservatives need them dumb enough to keep voting for them until the conservatives take that away too.
We're a powder keg waiting to explode while being manipulated and having access to all kinds of guns, at some point things are going to explode, or we'll just boil like the frog.
overworked AND lazy? make yourself make sense lol
Shouldn't it be obvious I mean two different types of people?
Also being overworked makes you lazy at home, it's called burnout, or if it's drugs, it's called being a functional addict. Overworked and burned out people also tend to miss details, get sloppier, and all these things compound.
But mostly what I meant by lazy parenting is the people that yell at or for their kids rather than going to them and speaking to them in a normal tone, or the parents that don't want to do the hard work of disciplining their kids, so they let them become little entitled nightmares, and the parents that abuse their kids because slowing down and dealing with them in a more acceptable manner takes too much effort. Another horrible example is the lazy parents who use their kids as piggy banks or ruin their credit for the parents gain, or expect their children to support them while the parents are still able to work.
I'm a grandpa and I've seen all this shit in my almost 50 years of life, some from my own parents, friends parents, parents of my kid's friends, grandkids friends parents, parents of the kids my family has fostered over the years, etc.
So yes overworked and lazy are the two problems, as well as impoverished and uneducated.
Makes sense to me. How does it not to you? Or are you arguing just to argue?
Three cuing is aggravating, but once I stopped trying to impose the way I learned on my kid when we were doing homework she figured it out. Also just getting her shit she is actually interested in reading did more than anything else. Not sure how to feel about it, trying not to yell at clouds.
I genuinely believe that this and the 'common core' math stuff are intentional measures to dumb down a population. Not really sure what to do about it though
Sadly, the generation was lost to the war on drugs. We were overzealous and refused to let them even get Hooked on Phonics.
My mother was a learning disabilities teacher consultant and hated 3 cuing. Most students sent to her once it started were fine when taught not that way.
The counterargument is that English is uniquely bad for phonetical spelling.
Never make fun of someone who says a word strangely. They may have only ever read it.
I’m not sure that phonics is the underlying reason American people don’t learn to read. I think there’s deep complex reasons for that.
blowing in the wind.
wind the clock.
I'm in my mid 40's and American, and I was taught to figure out word meanings from context clues back in elementary school. This isn't a new thing.
This isn’t about deriving meaning necessarily, but recognizing what word a word is. Take the example statement “the technique is ubiquitous across the nation.”
What you’re describing is using context clues to determine that ‘ubiquitous’ is an adjective to describe the technique and maybe that it has to do with how much it exists across the nation.
The technique described above is a counterpart to phonics. If you had never seen the word ‘ubiquitous’ before you could still phonetically parse out yoo(maybe “uh”)-bih-qui-tuss. With three-cueing, if ‘ubiquitous’ is a brand new word for you, you might pronounce it ‘all’ because that’s the word you already know that might make sense in that sentence. My understanding is that you’re not recognizing that those are two distinct but similar words, you’re just trained to guess at what the sentence is trying to say.
If you were taught how to sound out words you weren’t taught the way a lot of kids are taught to read today. Being able to read the whole sentence and guessing based on context already puts you significantly ahead of kids who have been taught with the three cueing method.
The technique isn't the issue, rather it's the fact that American kids are taught to use context before they're taught to differentiate the words from one another, apparently.
Yeah context clues are super important, but they're not a replacement for phonics
These not context clues in text but in picture. Little different.
No, context clues are a part of it.
Graphic cues come from the letters used in the word, syntactic cues from what part of speech is appropriate for its location in the sentence, and semantic cues from what word would contextually make sense.
I miss this, thank you.
I'm also in my 40s and the wiki article sounded exactly how I read, so I did a little searching and turns out this was the method used in schools in Ontario in the late 80s and 90s although not a formal part of the curriculum until 1997. So no, not a new thing. It was reversed after an inquiry by the human rights commission in 2022.
That might explain why my spouse who grew up in a different part of the province uses phonics and I use... word shapes, idk? I read extremely fast with good comprehension, but can't spell worth a damn lol.
I taught both my kids to read the way I learned to read, with phonics, they’re in their early 20d now but grew up as excellent readers
I learn new words by searching for the definition. Is that not a thing anymore? You don't have to go find a dictionary anymore. You can literally pull out your phone and type: "define xxx". I really hate our education system.
Oh, this is worse than that: it’s not just about their vocabulary being stunted, it’s that they can’t even recognize words they know because they don’t know how to sound out a word. Grim stuff.
Oh fuck me, that is grim. No way to know what that which you’re looking at means. That’s fucking terrifying! “Huh. The bottle’s got some tall, red letter words and exclamation points. I bet it means that this shit’s gonna taste awesome!”
And yet, the people who chose to make that change were taught to sound aloud, so really it's anyones game as to whichever outcome's better :P
Three cuing, or at least something like it which I cannot be bothered to check the term for is a valid reading technique, the difference being that it requires a certain degree of reading skill beforehand.
Certainly, you've learned a few words off the page, or television purely through context, and that's essentially 'three cuing'. Issue is, it's not an effective introduction to literacy, as it skips the foundational skills to reading. It was introduced based off studies of adult literacy, I believe.
But it worked for AI with BERT, so it will work for kids, right?!
/s
I know phonics has issues but at least it creates an internal framework to figure things out. No idea how this new system works, but phonics doesn’t preclude contextual reasoning and it’s tried and true for ages.
How do more symbolic writing languages work? Like Chinese characters where there’s just a huge variety of characters vs English’s Latin alphabet.
Wait, this is a real thing? I was handing in a marketing copy and one of my us colleagues mentioned that I was using fairly complicated language that most Americans won't understand. Is that the reason? I thought I had used normal level English that everyone who has learned it as a second language would understand. It never occurred to me that native speakers would have issues? Not in a business context at least?
As someone born and raised in the USA, like anything else in our country it's a gradient and not black and white. There are plenty of people who speak eloquently and can engage with an expansive vocabulary.
There also are, I'd wager almost certainly more, people who are borderline functionally illiterate for whom reading is a chore and who actively try to avoid it.
Beyond that, the vast majority of folks can read and write but have a limited lexicon and have not attempted (and probably won't) to grow their knowledge of English words. Most of us just get by and go along.
I don't know why I still am constantly surprised by just how stupid my compatriots are. Maybe I just want to believe in a better world. The sad reality is Americans, as a whole, are pretty goddamn dumb and ignorant and like it that way.
How it was implemented is going to vary by state and even by school, but this system was used for years in every state. Anyone in their mid 30s and older doesn’t have that excuse, but kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone and no sounding out words, because the theory was basically they just figure it out themselves.
A lot of them did not figure it out themselves.
kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone
Um. I think you might have misread the wiki article, three-cueing stopped being taught exclusively in 2000. (Sorry, really not trying to be shitty here)
By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were "vocabulary, comprehension and phonics". Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.
The research has been there for decades, but it hasn’t been reflected in the way reading was actually taught for a lot of students. Some states are just now introducing laws to make sure students aren’t being taught exclusively three cueing.
Do you have a source on the prevalence you are claiming? Sincerely asking, I work in education and this is very much contrary to what I have seen.
Absolutely, check out the American Public Media (they’re the second largest public radio in the US after NPR) investigative reporting in Sold a Story: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/season-1/ They have links for supporting reporting under some of the episodes: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2022/11/10/heinemann-sales-by-school-district
I am sorry I cannot watch the vid at the moment, but what a good article. The vid may talk about the current prevalence of teaching queuing (I think I'm so funny), I didn't see it come up beyond incidental mention in the article nor did it mention that the rate of teaching MSV has increased, but I overall agree with everything they're/you're saying there:
But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."
Yes absolutely, MSV is not a replacement for phonics.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context — including a picture if there is one — helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.
Again, absolutely correct. The beneficial parts of MSV are in learning to derive meaning and infer context from non-textual cues, not the whole dowsing-for-phonics thing.
I'm getting the distinct impression this is an overloaded term and that we're agreeing about phonics vs. MSV, I suspect it has (ironically) a fairly contextually-dependent meaning.
(edit: There's a whole side-topic about the hell that is "whole language")
Yes, if you are writing for the general public you need to keep it simple. A shocking number of people are barely literate, something like 1 in 5 adults in the US are illiterate.
It’s worse. From a search:
According to the 2023 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey, 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, meaning they struggle with multi-step instructions and complex texts. This represents a 9 percentage point increase in low literacy levels since 2017. Additionally, about 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level, and approximately 21% are classified as functionally illiterate.
Slightly less than 1 in 20 (at least in 2019. Unfortunately the last time this came up I couldn't find the PIAAC evaluations fully broken out more recently than that, and I have had no more luck this time)
In 2019, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported that 4.1% of US adults had literacy abilities below level 1, defined as "unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms", and could be classified as functionally illiterate.
Without an example of the text in question it's a pretty unanswerable stereotype, but it's possible. The topic of US literacy is an extremely complex one, but overall it had been trending up (until the kids were kneecapped by COVID) and US advanced literacy L3+ among non-college grads tends to be heavily siloed towards jargon shaped by the prevailing regional industry with little mixing between areas. It's a fascinating topic, really.
Anyways: minor criticism for OP as they're kinda basing their complaint on the idea that MSV is exclusively what is taught in the US; this hasn't been the case for decades. While they're absolutely right that MSV as an exclusive method for learning to read is a horrible approach, it's a very useful skill for inferring meaning from context, especially when combined with a foundation built on the standard vocab+definition+phonics framework.
Must be regional, because my 13, 9, and 5 year olds all sounded/are sounding out words in public school 🤷♂️
That’s awesome! And yeah, everything about American education is regional for better or worse. From what I understand it was implemented the most on the west coast and northeast, but some schools in every state used it.
tbh i dont really remember being taught how to read as a kid, other than i really struggled with lower case l vs capital I because they look exactly the fucking same half the time and autism. anyway i was taught to sound out words but i dont think it really made that much of a difference for me, other than giving me a mediocre ability to say words correctly after only reading them. the biggest thing was having things i was motivated to read. wanting to know wtf the words meant got me to look them up and wanting to know what happens next in the stories i was reading kept me going. the actual being taught how to read part of learning to read is such a tiny part. i think a much bigger issue is the structure of kid prison systematically beating the curiosity out of people.
Congrats on learning how ⅔ of the Turtle Islanders operate day-to-day.
Now you're aware why we insult them with rainbows of derogatories without being ableist about it.
To this day, they are also rank illiterate too.
My wife’s generation was the last to teach civics in junior high, so yes, zoomers & alphies are politically illiterate as well.😔
These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words
... Children who are learning to read are borderline illiterate. That's. That's the whole point.
Sure, but the obvious implication is that they will stay that way. "You need to learn how to read to know how to read" is the whole point
I think it’s bad to teach the strategies used exclusively by the worst readers and not strategies used by fluent readers (such as sounding out words), didn’t think that would be controversial. And yes, a large amount of schools specifically didn’t teach sounding out words due to a program they were sold. Look up Reading Recovery and Marie Clay if you want to learn more. Or talk to an American middle/high school teacher to see how well this turned out.
You cannot determine meaning from sounding out words, unless you already know those words. The core approach taught by MSV is almost completely unrelated to the skills built through phonics, which is why it was a huge problem when MSV was being exclusively taught as an alternative to phonics. That was a ridiculous approach. In practice, MSV is complementary to SSM and teaching it as a strategy to define from context in order to bootstrap one's vocabulary, rather than connect between spoken and written language (as in SSM), is greatly beneficial to development.
Beneficial in what sense? I really can't see the point in teaching kids to guess or choose their own meaning of what they're reading when we know for a fact that the vast majority of humans can actually read, not only almost read. I'm not arguing that it can't be a helpful tool to assist with learning disabilities, but I really can't see why it should be the default mode, unless there is/was an explicit desire to lower the reading comprehension of the population. Which is sadly not even that absurd to believe everything considered...
No, when we were teaching our child to read they would try to do this instead of sounding out or reading the words and just make up whatever the pictures looked like. It wasn't taught that way to them as far as I know, it was just a sneaky way of cheating, which didn't work. Now they can read at 2 grade levels higher than they are because we taught them how to sound out words correctly.
The media failed to load so I couldn't read this
It is interesting that in How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adle he says to read the work twice. The second time is a deeper read where you should look things up, however the first read through, if you don't know a word just try to guess at it from context. This is helpful with slang or words that have dual meanings, or for older works where the word might have changed meanings since then. Like Shakespeare's use of the word weed.
@catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone edit with☝️
Sorry, I can’t figure out extracting a link from this on mobile; on photon and on quokka’s default ui trying to copy the link just brings up my video player and I can’t find a direct link method 😭
photon, iirc a bigotted frontend, has it disabled.
Quokka’s pylova has is bottom right’s …
e.i.
Are you maybe confusing photon with Tesseract? If not I imagine our admins would want to know! And ty for the link, editing now
Tesseract I know for sure. photon iirc was admiralpatrick’s alt or something. don't really care to reresearch. either way, terrible you can't read markdown source.
yw😁
I knew about the Tesseract stuff but I’ll have to look into photon, I might just be perma blorp now even though I find the UI a bit loud lol
I am in the tesseract blocklist. Photon, iirc, had other word filters that made it queerphobic. For a long time, we were stick w/alexandrite. Now I am in pylova. But I adore alexandrite’s emoji/logogram UI. English is a genorific language to UI w/.
The image is just a gif of a guy saying “what the fuuuck”
